The present invention relates to enabling interaction among a plurality of services in a network and, more specifically, providing connectors to facilitate such interaction.
The vast majority of application services today are provided according to a computing model which is characterized by several limitations. According to this model, a user wishing to access any of a number of application services employs a client machine (e.g., a desktop computer) to generate a request for a particular service. This is typically facilitated by a browser operating on client machine. The browser is an application which communicates via a network (e.g., a public or private LAN or WAN) with a server which manages access to the application services. What is typically viewed by the user is a page (e.g., an html page) which is generated by the server and delivered over the network for display in the user's browser.
The server in this model typically employs a three-tiered architecture to manage access to the associated application services. A portal layer governs display of information presented in the client's browser. An application server layer manages access to the application services on a high level, but because of the varied nature of the application services, an integration layer is required to normalize the communications with these services. That is, the integration layer, which is the primary focus of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business-to-Business (B2B) providers, facilitates connection with and communication among the application services themselves. Unfortunately, the great variety of application services and the highly individualized nature of EAI and B2B solutions coupled with the limitations of this computing model have made EAI and B2B economically impracticable approaches for many enterprises.
In conjunction with the proliferation of Web services there has been movement toward and open, standards-based approaches to platform interoperability using standards such as XML, SOAP, BPEL, WSDL, UDDI, etc. However, the problem of getting disparate platforms to interact is still largely solved using an ad hoc approach involving considerable expense on the part of any business wishing to take advantage of the services available on the Web as well as a considerable duplication of effort.